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The Great Devourer – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

GRIM COUNSEL

The same night, in Iyanden’s Dome of Crystal Seers, Taec Silvereye sat cross-legged. He winced as the tremor shivered the skein and material worlds alike, his scars creasing awkwardly around the orb of metal that had replaced his left eye.

He pulled himself back from the skein, and looked around the half-ruined grove. The leaves on those few crystal trees still standing here tinkled. Wrath hung heavy over Iyanden.

He had been correct, then. The Avatar stirred, war was coming, and sooner than he had hoped. The question remained, whence came the threat?

This problem had exercised Taec for the best part of three cycles, since the sense of foreboding had stolen up on him. He could not divine why, and it had only grown. He had come to this hidden grove near the edge of the dome alone, compelled by this sense of doom that he dared not share. Before the Triple Woe, Taec had been something of a maverick. His predictions were seen as obscure and alarmist and dismissed by the Council Elder, Kelmon Firesight. But he had been proven correct. Kelmon was dead, slain after pursuing a false future to the ruin of Iyanden.

Vindicated and elevated to Council Elder, Taec now had the opposite problem. His every word was hung upon and dissected for hidden meaning, his least concern about the skein provoked panic. He had ceased to say anything, but his posture and gestures were as diligently interpreted. He had withdrawn from society, going into seclusion willingly where before it was forced on him. Taec had become increasingly aloof, but with good reason. He would not bring his fears to the rest of the High Council and seer council until he was absolutely sure where the threat came from.

The Avatar stirred. He still did not have the answer. Time was running out.

Taec sighed heavily, and closed his eyes. He regained his focus, leaving behind the concerns of form. Glad he was to do so; he was old now, and the Crystal Transformation of Morai-Heg was quickening. He sank into the warm embrace of the infinity circuit, the source of Iyanden’s power, its communications system and its compound soul. Made up of the millions of eldar who had died here over the arcs since the Fall, it was a spiritual refuge against the eternal torments of the Great Enemy.

The circuit spread out around him, as intricate as a circulatory system. The bright flames of the living moved along it. At the edges – a nonsense really, Taec’s mind forced upon the circuit a form he could understand, the infinity circuit had no true edge – the circuit’s capillaries and lacy vessels drew together into a handful of arteries that connected Iyanden to the greater eternity matrix linking all that remained of the eldar’s fractured domains.

Warp spiders clustered around Taec’s astral form and made their strange greetings. Further out crowded the ghosts of eldar gone before. Their shades were pictures made of flame; solid forms coalesced momentarily, before the dance of their energies attenuated or flared, wiping away any semblance of their lost bodies. It once was that Taec rarely encountered a spirit with cohesion enough to be aware of him. Since the Triple Woe, they dogged his footsteps always, petitioning him with their inchoate desires. The infinity circuit had swollen with the huge numbers felled in Iyanden’s recent battles, and the worldship throbbed with their power. They did not fade, their anger and multitude allowing them to cling to being where once they would have slept. The tranquillity of the circuit was gone. Iyanden was gripped by rage.

+This is not the way that it should be,+ he thought to them. +Return to your rest.+

They wavered, and drew back, but did not depart. Ordinarily they would have dispersed at his command, but these were not ordinary times.

From a pile of runes by Taec’s side in the dome, five rose into the air. They presented themselves in a line before the farseer’s face for approval. He did not open his eyes, but saw them nonetheless.

He nodded at the first four in turn, consenting to their selection. The first was his name-rune, his power focus. Two syllables combined into one ideograph to spell out his first name. Worn by use, its wraithbone was grey with age. Through this he could draw upon the power of the Othersea with little risk to his eternal essence. The other three runes were specific aids that would help him in divining the truth of his foreboding. The Scorpion, the revealer of hidden secrets; the Seeking Shaft, Kurnous’s arrow; the Flame of Asuryan, the world-rune of Iyanden itself. His name-rune stayed in front of his face, rotating gently. The other three lifted up to circle his head.

The fifth rune he regarded with his second sight for some time. The Bloody Hand, the rune of Kaela Mensha Khaine himself. He had not wished to employ this rune, but time was short and he had exhausted all other options. Khaine’s sign glowered at him, filling his mind with the stink of blood and hot iron. He decided to let it hang there, out of synchronisation with the others. He would not deploy it yet.

Taec looked past the shades in the circuit, past the traceries that linked the living and the dead of Iyanden, out beyond the eternity matrix, and onto the skein. The warp spiders were seemingly aware of his task, and corralled the dead, keeping them back so that they would not obscure his view. He watched the future, ignoring those who had passed before their time.

The beauty of the skein never failed to move Taec, and now, when the burning hand of Khaine hovered in his mind’s eye, it moved him all the more. The threat of destruction added to his appreciation. The skein defied description. The eldar tongue, for all its complex shades of nuance, could not encompass it. Even psychic communication and shared recollection could only hint at the skein’s glories, for all that was passed over was the seer’s subjective impression of it. Only pure mind could comprehend it, and then only while it was upon the skein, for when form and mind were one again, memories of the skein became flat.

But to be in it! All of reality was laid out before him. Threads twisted into yarns woven into tapestries depicting universes of possibility. Shards of infinitely shattering mirrors, each fragment showing the same event in different perspective; ripples alive with images on the surface of a lake, its depths also ablaze with scenes that were, could be, and had been. There were many ways of seeing the skein.

He deployed his first rune: the Scorpion. In the dome, it spun a little higher over him, breaking orbit with its fellows. The Scorpion had been the mainstay of his scryings these last cycles. It revealed nothing new to him. If anything, the skein grew more complicated. He had had no vision, seen nothing. His instinct was unerring, and had brought him here, but it was precious little to go on.

Next, the Flame of Asuryan.

Currents of potential ran crosswise, breaking the lines of fate, causing eddies and causal loops that twisted smokily and died. Under the influence of the rune, new threads forked at weaknesses in Iyanden’s destiny, each one branching and branching again, some heavy with the promise of destruction. All these fates were weak, improbably distant, and most collapsed as Taec regarded them.

He thought out for the wraithbone shapes of other runes, among them Vaul’s Anvil, the Tress, the Humbling Silence – half a dozen all told. With these he would weave a cage about the Bloody Hand, to direct its energies to his own ends. Khaine’s rune demanded precision, or it would show only what it desired to show, and that was mostly the seer’s own demise.

Taec spent several minutes crafting his runic binding, a dancing pattern of runes that circled a central point over his head, orbits stately as an orrery. Satisfied, he allowed Khaine’s rune to take its place at the centre of his creation.

Released rather than psychically impelled as the other runes had been, Khaine’s mark blazed upwards. Upon the skein it threw a fiery, sanguinary light. Taec was surprised that rather than shrinking back from it, the angry ghosts on the circuit beseeched it for vengeance. In the crystal dome, the rune glowed red-hot at the centre of its runic prison, raging against Taec’s entrapment of its energies.

Brought by Khaine’s hand, a thousand images of war flickered before Taec. He picked over them, examining them, bringing one into focus with the aid of his runes, dismissing another. Several frayed to nothing, banished from possibility by his scrutiny. His sense of impending disaster intensified, but nowhere could he find the cause.

Frustrated, he pulled back, letting time run on, seeing the skein break and reform under the influence of a trillion unremarkable events.

He listened to the ghosts. Their clamour for vengeance was unprecedented. As if in reply to their petition, another psychic pulse perturbed his meditations, sending through the skein a slow wash of disturbance. New possibilities erupted all around Taec, none the ones he sought.

Vengeance, he thought. The ghosts call for vengeance.

He called up Anaris, the Prize of Vengeance. The rune was a stylised miniature sword, depicting that with which Khaine slew Eldanesh. Another dark symbol, a portent of revenge. In the dome it orbited the world-rune of Iyanden, spinning on its axis, point down.

A twitch in the skein, or in his soul. Manifested as pure mind on the skein, there was little to distinguish Taec from the fates he observed: they were one. His attention focused on Anaris intently, and the point swept up away from him and shot off ahead, hurtling into unknown futures. He followed hard, travelling the darkest of fates, those that saw his depleted home aflame for a fourth time; and the influence of the Bloody Hand brought many that saw his own end. Taec felt some of the pain at the deaths of these shadow selves as he chased Anaris down his chosen thread of destiny. Elation built. For all his poise, Taec was as excited as any huntsman who spies quarry.

Anaris slowed, point quivering, at a pulsing nexus where many lines of possibility converged; an inevitability, then. As he approached, Taec saw a red world in the throes of death.

A glimpse, deep red and bone white, alien armour grown not worn. A thick skein woven from many braids whipped into view on the far side of the nexus.

He had seen such a thing before.

With mounting trepidation, Taec pulled Draoch-var out from the bulging rune pouch by his meditating form. The Dragon. The rune had accrued many meanings over the arcs, and had gained a new one recently. It stood for the Great Devourer, the Star Ravener, the Hunger from the Void. The tyranids, which the eldar called the Great Dragon.

With Draoch-var he brought the Parting of the Ways. Modified by the Parting of the Ways, Draoch-var represented the hive fleet Far Ranging Hunger, the one the humans called Kraken.

Well Taec knew the signs of the beast: a tendril of Far Ranging Hunger had almost destroyed Iyanden seven passes before. This was the second incident of the Triple Woe, and – in denying Taec’s prediction of it – Kelmon Firesight’s greatest folly. The skein was still scarred with that happening. Iyanden’s population had been reduced by seven-tenths, and its physical form had not yet recovered. It might never recover.

Khaine’s Bloody Hand rotated over scenes of swarming aliens.

Crowding behind him, the ghosts of Iyanden saw what Taec saw, and they were further enraged.

Taec irritably demanded their silence, for he had seen something new and troubling. Amid the bone and red of Far Ranging Hunger’s weapon-beasts he caught flashes of white and purple.

More voidspawn, those the eldar called Starving Dragon and the humans Hive Fleet Leviathan.

Taec looked closer, subtly manipulating the skein, but could see little more. The great mind of the tyranids blocked his sight, the psychic roar of it hampering all attempts at divination. He saw, again and again, the same scene, hordes of horrific beasts bounding over a dusty plain. An echo of beauty clung to the planet’s dead world spirit. An eldar world, an old one. A name, Dûriel, came into his mind, and then another – Valedor, given to it by the trespassing mon-keigh. A True Star system despoiled by human usurpers, then despoiled again.

Taec looked through funereal smoke, black and thick with death. His body twitched in recognition of the bone and red, so deep was the horror at the loss the latter had inflicted upon Iyanden. It leaked through his trance, bringing with it a memory of a swiping claw, agony, and the loss of earthly sight in his left eye.

He suppressed the echoes of pain, concentrating his mind on this future. On a whim he modified his cycling rune pattern with the Twin Birds. It joined the others circling his meditating form. On the skein, its component parts Hawk and Falcon split, becoming aethereal, and headed off along the tangled futures. Even here, at this nexus, time was a confused jumble, many paths crossing and ending. The thunder of the hive mind, a billion billion alien voices shouting simultaneously, obscured all.

Hawk and Falcon rejoined, and he followed. A coming together.

The Avatar bellowed, his fury dancing across the timelines. A wall barred Taec: the Shadow in the Warp was directly before him. He wondered if it could sense his probing, if it had any inkling he was there. The strands balked at the dense alien being, ran around it, as if these lines of time and space were in fear of it. The skein twisted, went within the nexus; few strands escaped.

Taec was not to be denied. Summoning all his will and channelling it through the rapidly orbiting runes, he looked deep into this pivotal moment of time, smashing aside the blankness of the hive mind.

What Taec saw froze him to the core.

Two breeds of voidspawn came together as a world died; they fought in savage mating, Dûriel’s dying lands fertile fields for their joining. Hive fleets merged and new forms of death were their get.

‘Far Ranging Hunger joins with Starving Dragon, two become one, two become one!’ he half-sang to himself. Taec watched as the immense minds of the two fleets reached out towards each other, groping blindly across the streams of probability. The components of the hive minds were spiritually puny, whisper-thin lines generated by bestial minds. But with so many twisted together, they made a mighty cable of fate, dwarfing all other threads on the skein.

As the twin cables of the hive fleets’ consciousnesses drew near to one another, their strands unwrapped. Their writhing tendrils reached, grasped, and the two pulled into conjunction. As one they were monstrous. Taec had a glimpse far back along their ancient path. As Far Ranging Hunger’s fleets made many splinters of one larger consciousness, so the wholes of Far Ranging Hunger and Starving Dragon were themselves only tendrils of something so vast it was beyond Taec’s scope to comprehend.

The psychic shock of the joining reverberated down through time. Sudden visions of many world-deaths crowded near-past, present and future. With a vertiginous rush, the ultimate doom of the eldar loomed into view over Taec, as a black and impenetrable mountain. This certainty of extinction was pricked by few lights of unreadable hope. Behind the black walls of the race-death lurked the pervasive presence of She Who Thirsts. Her lusts washed at Taec’s wards as the sea washes at the feet of cliffs, seeking to erode their foundations and bring them down.

Taec blocked the Great Enemy, muttering verses of focus to bring that part of his mind tasked with guarding his essence to greater alert, pushing the soul-threat from his mind. She had not taken him yet, and would not do so today.

No, what concerned him here was not the doom of the soul, but of the flesh.

He followed the eventuality of the hive fleets’ merging, watching the landscapes of possibility unfold through his third eye. Images flickered, the multiple paths of fate layered atop one another. He fought his way through confused futures, to discard the middling and inconsequential differences that clouded the truth, looking for a clearer vision.

Many futures sprang from the nexus, all dire. The psychic backwash was intense. Blood and war. Creatures made stronger by the genetic inflow of ork, human, and eldar, perfectly forged for the death of not only Taec’s kind, but the entire galaxy. The stars of hope in the black doom winked out one by one, the few threads of the skein stretched out to them unravelled. There was nothing beyond the blackness but the laughter of his people’s twisted daughter. The shades of the dead clamoured, pushing at the warp spiders. Their minds brushed his like cobwebs.

Another tremor rocked the skein and physical world both, bringing with it a tide of hatred and anger. The dead were invigorated by it. Taec despaired. So much rage was in the circuit now – where was the noble Iyanden of the past?

The hands of the departed grasped at his astral form. They meant him no harm. They would speak. Long practice as a farseer kept panic at bay. He redoubled the guard on his soul, but let the energies that touched him pour through the crystallising flesh of his earthly form. Around his body in the dome, more runes shot into the air from his pouch, burning with sudden heat. The orbits of those runes already airborne became faster. Each burned brighter and brighter, until a constellation of miniature suns circled him.

Taec suppressed his anguish as his mouth opened without his volition, driven by the necromantic energies of Iyanden’s overfull otherworld. The words of the dead seared his tongue, each one molten with the fires of wrath.

‘The Voidspawn shall be cast into the abyss,’ he said, and the voices were of many, and none was his own. ‘To a dying flame shall the hungry ones be drawn.’ His body spasmed, learned though he was in the ways of the skein. His skin crawled. ‘There to meld with their kin. There to quicken the Great Change.’

A final flash, glimpses of many things. A lone eldar stood in silhouette before a red sea. A second red sea of molten rock. Two hearts, one consumed by fire, the other emitting cleansing flame.

A blazing pillar roared up in front of Taec. He stood upon a shaking mountainside. A world burned around him. Taec reached for a giant’s hand and slipped. Plunging into searing lava, his body and his waystone were destroyed together.

He fell into the next life, a third sea of maddening energy. There the fires did not go out.

The Dark Prince laughed as Taec’s soul slipped into his grasp. The Bloody Hand of Khaine turned.

Psychic energy blasted out from Taec. He gasped, coming out of the skein quickly. Vitreous leaves rattled in the grove, setting up discordant, tinkling melodies in the aftermath of his scrying.

The runes orbiting him flared, then clattered upon the clear stone.

Peace returned.

Taec swallowed. His limbs shook. His thin, ancient skin burned. He looked down.

Five runes were before him, smoking and black, the Dragon Draoch-var at their centre. The Flame of Asuryan lay some distance from it, and between them was set the world-rune of Biel-Tan: the Rebirth of Ancient Days. At the end of the line was the Dying Fire, and a last rune, obscure and dark in portent – Llith’amtu Khlavh, the Knife That Stays The Blade.

A sixth caught his eye, away from the quintet of principal runes, but lying within the measure of influence. The Balance of Asuryan, canted. It lay on its side, imparting ambiguity to all. He looked for the other runes. They were all around him; some he had chosen, some he had not. They added inflection to the others. Perhaps. Most had come down too far for a sure reading. The crude rune denoting mankind, the Asurya, the Broken Tree Of Paradise Lost, and more.

Taec swept the first up, holding it in his hand. Draoch-var. This, at least, was clear.

‘The Great Devourer is not done with Iyanden,’ he said. Sorrow welled in his breast, of an intensity hard to bear.

A voice came to him, as from a great distance. The crystals of the dome thrummed as the soul of Farseer Kelmon Firesight whispered in his mind.

+Or Iyanden is not done yet with the Dragon.+

Taec nodded his agreement. Wearily, he pushed himself to his feet. He saw what must be done, but the others might not. The last century had been hard on his people. Three times had Iyanden been directly attacked: the Triple Woe. First, the Battle of the Burning Moon against Chaos, which had led to the destruction of House Arienal and the shaming of Prince Yriel, then the ravages of Far Ranging Hunger, finally war against the orks and another invasion of the craftworld’s sacred ground. Iyanden’s fleets were all but spent in wars with humans, orks, necrons and the infernal beings of the warp. Despite the great sorrow and fury of the living, there was little further appetite for conflicts far from home. In such times they did not seem… pressing.

Convincing Prince Yriel to fight on the far side of the galaxy would be easy; he remained wild and warlike, despite taking to the path again. The rest of the High Council might be difficult to convince. Iyanna certainly would not be lightly turned from her occult quest. She teetered on the brink of obsession, that one, and was becoming dangerous.

He needed a clearer reading. He needed aid.

Taec moved awkwardly as he pulled gloves over hands greying with the early signs of crystallisation. His limbs were stiffening. His time was drawing to a close. Soon he would set root here, amid the broken statues of his predecessors. He reached out his hand to his staff, floating some metres away. At his bidding it flew across the room to him, slapping quietly into his palm. He leaned on it, letting it draw him strength from the soul of Iyanden; quieter now its message was delivered, though heavy with expectation.

Unchecked wraithbone extrusions surrounded him, the product of the overcharged infinity circuit, swollen as it was with the souls of so many million dead. Throughout battered Iyanden the bonesingers coaxed the growths back, but here at the interface between Iyanden’s spiritual and physical aspects they would not be tamed. The signs of war were everywhere in the Dome of Crystal Seers, even as elsewhere they were smoothed away. The vitrified bodies of ancient seers were smashed, their pieces left where they had fallen. In places the stumps of shattered crystal trees outnumbered those whose branches still spread to frame the stars. The floor was pitted and cracked. And in this part of the forest the signs of destruction were not so pronounced; where Kelmon had perished the crystal had turned black, and no scrying could be made there. In the Dome of Crystal Seers the desolation of the worldship was plain for all to see and so it would remain forevermore.

‘And yet war has not done with Iyanden,’ he said.

As if in answer, another tremor rolled out.

‘The Avatar stirs.’

Taec took a sky-runner across Iyanden. His celebrity was such that he was noticed wherever he went. He was so shaken he could not bear the eyes of his fellows on him, and avoided the public spear-cars and transitways.

House Haladesh was close to the Dome of Crystal Seers, both being towards the aft of Iyanden, but the way between the two had become as crooked as that of the skein. Many of the lesser domes were still without atmosphere. Perhaps in less troubled times their like would have been let loose to float away into space, and new ones raised in their place. But Iyanden in flight was far from any star that might consume them, and the council were wary of leaving a breadcrumb trail for the Great Dragon to follow. Furthermore, so great had the damage been to the craftworld, that those bonesingers who oversaw the skeleton of Iyanden feared that to lose so much mass from the remainder at once could lead to unforeseen gravitic stressing. And so the broken areas of Iyanden remained attached, grim reminders to a people who needed no reminding of their suffering.

In places where many had died, bizarre wraithbone forests had sprung up, the uncanny trees each seizing an unclaimed spirit stone. These were haunted areas, where spirits had turned wicked in their pain. Taec avoided them. Transit tubes were broken, doors healed shut with thick growths of wraithbone like scars upon wounds. In parts, power was erratic, and the fluctuating artificial gravity of the craftworld tossed his skiff about as if a tempest raged. In other places too much energy was expressed, and those lights that had not exploded shone like the trapped suns of the domes.

And everywhere there was ruin. House Arienal was a blasted wasteland, scorched lifeless by cyclonic torpedoes in the Battle of the Burning Moon, first of the Triple Woes. The psychic shock at so many deaths had been of such magnitude that all but one of the Arienalani had died, their spirits fleeing into their waystones the instant their kin perished.

Taec sped over blackened remnants of palaces and parks. Twilight reigned here, light coming only from the stars and from cracks in the fabric of the worldship wherein the raw infinity circuit sparkled. In the ruins of a palace he saw a gathering of wraithkind, but no other movement. Even the walking dead of Arienal were few in number, and the whispers of unquiet spirits were all around him.

How Iyanna Arienal had not been driven mad with grief was a mystery.

Talks on the restoration had begun shortly before Far Ranging Hunger had attacked. The seals had been reinstated in preparation, but now, in all probability, the dome would stay ruined.

He left the shattered house by the forward tubes, thrusting down a highway that once was full of bright, darting craft, but was now traversed by only him. He passed into the Endless Forest, seven great domes run one into the other to create a huge wilderness. The forest harboured artful ecosystems engineered from the life forms of a hundred thousand worlds. The Great Dragon had fought hard for this delectable morsel, and the scars of its assault were to be seen everywhere, the earth scraped down to the raw wraithbone core in places. The bonesingers and wilderers would be occupied for many arcs to come.

The signs of war became lighter as Taec entered House Haladesh. The council, with him as its reluctant head, had directed restoration efforts to be concentrated where the most eldar still lived. He flew over rebuilt villages empty of people, through domes whose biomes were being laboriously reconstructed. Eventually he saw other eldar, small groups at first, and then in increasing numbers. If anything his sense of isolation grew as he came across them.

Taec came to Urhaithanalish, House Haladesh’s main city, set in its own dome at the junction between nine others like the heart of a flower. Near its centre he alighted from the sky-runner. He strode with purpose through an empty tunnel from the landing site. All was pristine, no mark of war in these parts. House Haladesh had been spared the worst of fate’s caprice, and what damage there was had been largely sung away. But there were no scions of that house abroad here. Always populous, the numbers of Haladesh’s folk were still great compared to the others of Iyanden’s peoples, but many had died, and lesser roads such as the one he trod were oftentimes free of traffic.

Taec reached a wider way that took him to a market square, and there something of Iyanden’s old glory was evident. Eldar of all ages and paths went on their business, in thinner crowds than before the Triple Woe to be certain, but the hum of conversation settled Taec’s troubled spirit after the ominous silence of the desolation. Underpinned though it was by sorrow and less vital than of old, there was cause for hope in the chatter, and in the wares displayed in the square by those on artisanal paths.

He found it hard to admit to himself, but he was unnerved. He told himself that the terrible fate that awaited him was by no means a certainty, and that all the runes of Khaine delighted in showing their users’ vilest ends. Somehow, he felt that this was different. Ever heedful of his inner feelings, Taec was greatly perturbed. He desired to halt, to take wine and engage in talk of something other than dark destinies, but he did not. The other eldar did not bother him, but he knew they saw him, and that many itched to approach him.

And so the single indulgence he allowed himself was to proceed on foot at brisk pace. Time was of the essence, but he required time to think, to calm himself, and to formulate his words well. He drew upon his experiences upon the Path of the Playwright, dim though his recollections were, as he pushed on through Haladesh. Simplicity, he thought, not adorned phrases. One had to be direct when speaking with the dead.

He passed from the city into Haladesh’s lake and woodlands. As blessed as it was, in Haladesh too there were domes laid waste by the wars, although here most had been restored to bare spaces awaiting restocking. He went across arching bridges over deep fissures in the craftworld, protected from the void only by thin energy sheaths. He walked through the tightly packed streets of lesser townships. Thousands of homes were empty in Iyanden; every eldar living could have claimed a palace should he have wished, but many desired close proximity to one another, needing the buzz of life after so much death. Crammed settlements were much in vogue. The echoing halls and domes left empty were wastelands of the soul.

On he went, taking up another public sky-runner to cross Haladesh’s large central desert. He swooped over the grasslands at its edge, putting herds of scarlet ungulates to flight, then ran with the birds out over the sands. He passed over the Hidden Gorge, that jewel in the desert’s heart, a chasm that split the sands as far as the crystal bedrock of the craftworld. Cliffs of bright rock made up its upper reaches, a wide lake at their head. The thunder of waterfalls pouring from the lake boomed, and Taec looked down into the canyon, misty and broad, thick with the verdure of uncounted star systems. In the deeps a wide river glowed with the light of the exposed infinity circuit at its bed. Then he was over it, and the thunder receded as if it never was, and the sand glared at him. The dome was hot, its beauty was a hard one. In the sands he saw the tents of those who had withdrawn from community, following the Path of Solitude.

Mourning, Solitude, Wandering, Lament, Eulogy, Forgetting, Remembrance, Dreaming; many eldar of Iyanden had taken to these paths in recent days. Others flocked to the aspect shrines, their rage unsleeping after their participation in the craftworld’s battles. Aspect shrines long-dormant rose again, and no bad thing. The wisdom of their exarchs was required lest the kindled fury of the Iyandeni send them off down the dark road of their ancestors, a worrisome future that occupied much of Taec’s thoughts.

Taec left the sky-runner by a tether at the dome’s edge, and walked from blistering heat into cool galleries. Tiered and dimly lit, they looked out over the void. Iyanden was far away from any system, making all speed across interstellar space from the tyranid-beset Eastern Fringe. The stars shone coldly upon the craftworld, flintily unsympathetic to its fate.

The galleries ran on for several thousand paces. Taec passed lovers whispering in the dark, small groups staring into space, sole eldar weeping in secret nooks. He ignored them all. He listened, form, mind and being, for further stirrings of the Avatar, but the shattered god offered no more disturbance.

‘Hoi hoi!’ a voice called him. Taec glanced over. A young eldar was sat in a drinking den recessed into the worldward wall of the galleries, a dark place serving bitter wines to doleful drinkers. His voice was mocking, his body language spoke of callowness and cynicism. ‘Taec Silvereye is abroad in House Haladesh! What business has he here? With whom will he speak – the living, or the dead?’

The youth laughed, as if he had made an outrageous jest. His laughter was tinged with hysteria. It was a sound Taec had become too accustomed to of late.

As Taec passed, a young woman hushed the youth. Their souls were bright fires, wrapped around each other. Twins, a rare beauty in these times. The other drinkers, the flames of their essence darker, looked on unamused, disturbed from their miseries. Taec hurried onwards into areas empty of the living.

By this way Taec came at last to the Mistmaze Spire, the Ghost Halls of Haladesh.

Wraithblades, their helms marked with the runes of House Haladesh, stood guard over the spire’s sole remaining gate, a small portal large enough for a wraithlord to pass through but no more. All other gates were closed over with wraithbone at the behest of the dead.

The wraithblades faced forward, arms out at their sides so that their sword tips crossed and barred the way. This position a living being would find hard to maintain for any length of time, but the wraithblades were still as statues.

Taec reached out to the wraithkind with his mind. Their souls were dim, flames turned low; watchful nonetheless.

A dolorous voice reached into him, dry and quiet as wind in a tombyard. Taec’s soul chilled at its touch.

+What business have you here, here in the halls of the dead?+

‘I seek counsel,’ Taec said aloud. ‘I wish to speak with Wraithseer Kelmon Firesight. War comes again. The final doom of all the eldar is upon us. I would avert it.’

No response came. Taec waited patiently, for the dead are beholden to no clock but their own.

‘You may pass, Taec Silvereye,’ they said as one. Their swords lifted, crystalline blades rasping on one another. The blank wall of the gates developed edges and its petals drew back.

And so Taec passed from the lands of the living into the realm of the dead.

In appearance, the Ghost Halls were as any other hall within the houses of Iyanden, complexes of interlocking domes and chambers, some small, some vast. Ecospheres of many kinds were found within, as were towns, workshops, great palaces, apartment spires and humble homes. In manner, they were unlike anything that had ever been seen upon Iyanden before, or any other craftworld for that matter. Within the ghost halls dwelt not living eldar, but the revived dead. Drawn back into their waystones and plucked from the infinity circuit, the dead were placed inside wraithbone bodies to bolster Iyanden’s reduced armies. It was an ancient, if distasteful, practice. The wraithkind ordinarily returned to their sleep once their task was done, but sustained by the overcharged infinity circuit, many refused to return to their slumber, and this truly was unprecedented.

The wraithkind walked the halls of the craftworld, unnatural things neither of life nor of death, the numinous caged by wraithbone artifice. In battle the warriors of Haladesh gave as selflessly in death as they had in life, but their sense of purpose ceased with battle’s silenced clamour. They were caught between the two worlds, and in Iyanden’s fleeting moments of peace they spent the cycles endlessly re-enacting what little they could remember of their past existences.

Taec saw this shadow play of life all around him inside the Mistmaze Spire. The utterly silent forms of wraithguard trod its ways. The wraithlords, the greatest of their number, remembered well what they had once been and moved with purpose. Many were abroad in the craftworld, reassuming the roles death had forced them to lay down. Outside the ghost halls they were treated as equals, albeit coolly. Even the greatest souls still had one foot in the infinity circuit, for all their vitality.

The minds of the lesser wraithkind were but collections of compulsions, barely perceiving the world around them. Their eyes looked upon vistas of mind, not of form.

The dead were not as the living.

Taec walked past an audience of wraithkind silently watching a stage upon whose boards giant, robotic players did not move. He saw the huge hands of the resurrected cup empty glasses and eating utensils. They knocked them carelessly against the long heads of the units that imprisoned their souls as they attempted to eat and drink. In bio-domes, crowds of wraithguard stood stock-still in fields of many-hued grasses; others walked to and fro, wearing grooves in the soil as they repeated over and again some small action that the soul recalled perfectly, but in which Taec saw no meaning.

Most of the dead he saw were of the lesser kind. The handful of wraithlords abroad in the Mistmaze Spire spared him no thought whatsoever. All but one. Taec was acquainted with him: Teradryan the Lyric. The farseer was wise enough not to disturb him. For his part that exception only turned his great, eyeless face to look at Taec to follow his progress as he walked by, and then returned to whatever occupied him.

The spire was dimly lit. A cliche almost, thought Taec, but there is no cliche without truth, and the dead had little need for light. However, where infinity circuit nodes, the touch interfaces the eldar used to commune psychically with each other and the craftworld, were set into the wall, the space around them glowed with hot light. Ghosts flocked to their ancestral homes rather than accepting forgetfulness in the lethe of the circuit. Through these interstitial points the bodiless looked outward, the power their spirits contained overloading the devices they touched.

Taec had sympathy for Kelmon. This state of affairs was so unnatural no one should be surprised he misread the skein. No one could have predicted this.

War had come and war had gone, and the dead walked. All remained in order. The mechanisms of the craftworld kept the Ghost Hall pristine, aided by the living servants of the wraithkind, those who had taken a new branching upon the Path of Service as the Tenders of the Dead. As the dead served the living in war, so the living served the dead in peace. They cleared away the shattered objects the wraithkind left in their wake. Eyes ringed with ritually streaked make-up, heads shaved and expressions dead, they were as silent as their charges.

The atmosphere was heavy. If that outside the ghost halls was sorrowful, within melancholy reigned unopposed. Taec’s mind was suffused with it, and it would not be shaken off.

In a dome of purple vegetation, beneath a permanent twilight, was a grand palace of soaring roofs and unlikely minarets. There Taec found Kelmon.

The dead farseer’s wraithlord body was seated upon a throne carved from a single giant pearl. Seven large skulls were set above it – those of the serpentine voidspawn that had slain him. Wraithbone runes, enormous in size, were scattered over the floor. Kelmon was surrounded by dead courtiers who prosecuted their repetitive business in total silence. Living there were also – three on the Path of Service stood on Kelmon’s left, a spiritseer in full mask to his right. The spiritseer was deep in conversation with Kelmon as Taec arrived, the wraithseer’s enormous head dipped towards her, a giant listening to a child. She stopped talking immediately she sensed Taec, and all four living eldar bowed their heads to their leader and withdrew.

‘Welcome, my friend,’ said the wraithseer. His voice was sonorous and somnolent, almost free of inflection. Nor did he move as he spoke. Shorn of all nuance of gesture and tone, the words of the dead were unlovely. ‘You have come, as I foresaw.’

As he had earlier decided, Taec did not wait upon ceremony. The dead maintained focus on the affairs of the living for such short duration, even ones so mighty as departed Kelmon.

‘The Avatar stirs,’ he said plainly.

‘A tremble in his slumber. He sleeps again,’ countered Kelmon.

‘Once his sleep is disturbed, it is over. He will come to full wakefulness soon,’ said Taec.

‘That is so. What is it you would know, Taec Silvereye of House Delgari?’

‘You have seen what I see?’

A long pause. Silence was a province of death, and Taec had strayed deep into it. The courtiers continued their ghostly rituals, over and over again.

‘Yes,’ said Kelmon. ‘I have seen. A red world, Dûriel, a maiden ravaged and now devoured.’

‘Then I would know this, wraithseer, you who were once my colleague and friend. Can we afford to act? I fear not to, but I equally fear action. What see you? Can we afford to wait and hope for a better turn of events? I hope fervently that it is so, but doubt very much that I will receive the answer I long for. You, mighty Kelmon, you have seen what I have, doubtless more clearly. You eyes are not clouded by the world of the living, your view is unimpeded by flesh. Tell me that I am right, that my castings do not lie, and so I might go forward along this skein without guilt.’

Kelmon sat forwards. The arcane technologies of his body were silent, and that underscored his eeriness. ‘There is always guilt, farseer. No path can be taken without it, nor without regret. You call me friend. I was never your friend while alive, and I regret it mightily,’ he said. ‘I ignored you, ridiculed you, and was a fool to do so. If I could change what was, I would, but I cannot. I cannot offer my friendship now, for what use is the friendship of the dead? No warmth and laughter will you find here, no support or timely rebuke. And what is friendship to the dead? All is dust and eternity, with a gaping maw at time’s end.’

Taec bowed his head.

Kelmon waved a slow hand. ‘Your respect is not necessary. I can grant what you request, a second reading of your own vision.’ A number of the runes in front of Kelmon’s throne lifted off the ground. He looked at them as they turned in the half-light of the hall. The silence went on for a long time.

Said Kelmon eventually, ‘I see war, and ruin. The mating of two dragons brings the birth of a new and greater. The legions of steel rise in number, She Who Thirsts follows in the wake of the young races. The time of ending is at hand. All this you have seen.’

‘What can we do?’ asked Taec.

‘What we always have done – scry, foresee, avoid, survive.’

‘And in this instance? What is your specific guidance, Kelmon? Is my vision correct? Do we risk all for Dûriel?’

‘You ask the wrong questions, as I once did. Do not do as I did.’

Taec thought, formulating his next words with care. ‘What if we act? I cannot foretell, the mind of the Great Dragon obscures all. Doom and death is all I can perceive.’

Kelmon’s long head swung slowly to and fro, as if his smooth faceplate had eyes and he could see as the living see. ‘The bonesingers have done their work well here. This hall was ruined, and you would never know it. It is unmarked, seemingly unchanged. But it is not. It was destroyed, and the psychic shock of its destruction is still there. That is the hall I perceive, not this phantom. For all our arts, we cannot sing the living back to life, try as we might.’ The wraithlord gestured at his slender body. ‘In other halls the dead preside in airless sterility. I am fortunate indeed.’ Kelmon laughed bitterly. Taec shrank involuntarily back; the laughter of the dead is not a thing to be heard by the living. ‘Time heals all, they say. It heals nothing, I say.’

Taec leaned on his staff. ‘I remember how, before the Triple Woe, that even at this late hour the corridors of the Mistmaze would echo with song, I mourn its loss, Wraithseer Kelmon.’

‘Your sympathy is noted.’

‘How can I not sympathise? Your people are mine, even if you never were aware of that.’

Kelmon dipped his mighty head in acknowledgement. ‘I say I was a fool. What do you think, O greatest of our number? Tell me, Taec. You are no fool, not as I was.’

Taec stood tall. Boldness was required, and honesty. And Kelmon in death was not the same eldar as Kelmon in life. ‘If we do not act, no matter the risk, then the stars will be emptied of the eldar race as surely as Iyanden has been emptied.’

‘Great is my shame, greater than the pride I bore and that brought our home to ruin. I will not make the mistakes in death I made in life. Thankfully, yes, my vision is clearer than yours.’ He pointed a long finger at Taec, an oddly direct gesture for the unliving. ‘This cannot be allowed to happen. You are correct in your words, action is our only recourse.’

Taec sagged, relieved and terrified in one.

‘But I cannot see as well as you might like.’ Kelmon stood, his blank helm-face, emblazoned with the infinity rune and the sigil of House Haladesh, staring down at Taec. ‘I will say this, Taec Silvereye. If we ignore this fate and turn aside, many are the Iyandeni lives we will save, but in the short term only.’ He pointed at the runes orbiting his great head one after another. ‘A thousand more passes we might persist, until the Great Dragon withers the galaxy unto desert, and the young races be consumed. Long before then, the Eye will open wide. The Womb of Destruction will give birth to countless foul children, and the great doom of the eldar will feast upon all our spirits. Chaos will corrupt the remainder of the sentient, before passing on as all wildfires must. The threat spent, the soulless ones will rule an empire of dust until the stars die. Know this – the great war finally we shall lose, and all will have been for nothing.’

Kelmon looked off into the distance, over the heads of his dreaming courtiers. ‘The Avatar has stirred. Kaela Mensha Khaine thirsts for further battle. This is our cue – we ignore it to the peril of all eldar. We must act, you are right. We must act.’

‘How, what course must we take?’

‘I cannot see the full truth,’ said Kelmon, and for a moment his voice took on some of the pride and power he had had in life. ‘Not past the wall of thought that surrounds the Great Dragon. I am blinded by its mind as much as you. If it is as you fear, that Far Ranging Hunger is abroad once again, then let the spiritseers help. The dead taken by the Great Dragon are not gone, not entirely. A trace of them remains, a patina of horror on the animal souls of the Great Dragon’s voidspawn. This can be followed. If our prophecy is true, then so guided by the suffering of our dead shall we see the future we have glimpsed entire.’ Kelmon became strident, his voice taking on many of the characteristics he had possessed in life – over-confidence and pomposity might have been among them, but there was no denying his wisdom. ‘We require a conclave. Many seers, acting in concert, the Athelin Bahail – the Mind Choir. That will see us to the truth of the matter, and open up the skein so that we may draw our plans. The Mind Choir will set our course, for good or for ill.

‘You are head of the seer council, Taec. You must summon them.’

‘Then you must come with me, be a part of it.’

‘The living no longer listen to me,’ said Kelmon.

‘I am living, I listen. They will also. Come, I need your aid.’ Taec held out his hand to Kelmon, a reflection of what he had seen in his vision.

This time, their fingers met.

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Valedor first published in 2014.
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